Abstract
Point-based surface representations have gained increasing interest in the computer graphics community over the past decade. Surface splatting has turned out to be a popular rendering technique for point clouds. This seminar introduces a technique for ray-tracing objects whose surfaces are represented by point clouds. It deals with the basic problems of splat generation, ray-splat intersections and normal interpolation on splat surface. Since ray-tracing methods require smoothly changing surface normals for producing the desired photorealistic results, splat generation must include the derivation of such normals. Furthermore, ray-splat intersection is an expensive step in complex scenes, and a technique is discussed to accelerate this using oct-trees.
